With very large downloads, alt.binz causes excessive hard disk activity. For instance, if I download several 7GB NZBs in a row, the repairing/unraring of completed downloads interferes with the decoding and checking of the ongoing downloads.
Both repairing/unraring and decoding generate a lot of hard disk activity by themselves. But combined, i.e., with everything going on in parallel, it takes A LOT more time than if the tasks were done in sequential order. The total time required is much higher than the sum of all individual tasks.
To illustrate: Unraring of a 7GB download by itself only takes a few minutes. Decoding of 100MB parts is only a matter of seconds. But if both are going on at the same time, the total time it takes is easily one hour or more. In fact, everything becomes so slow, alt.binz keeps queueing finished downloads for decoding - which slows everything down further. Even a large temp drive will eventually run out of space.
As a possible solution I could imagine an option that would allow to choose between parallel activity (as it is now, suitable for "small" downloads) and sequential completion of tasks. "Sequential completion" would mean that a task that uses hard disk resources would only start after all other hard-disk intensive tasks have finished.
